Madam

“Why? that goes without saying, Rosalind. Your father, to my mind, has never been so bad; and your— I mean Madam—”

“You mean my mother, Uncle John. Well! is she not my mother? I have never known any other. Poor dear little mamma was younger than I am. I never knew her. She is an angel in heaven, and she cannot be jealous of any one on earth. So you think that because papa has never been so ill, and my mother never had so much to bear, it would be the right thing for me, the eldest, the one that can be of most use, to go away?”

“She has her own children, Rosalind.”

“Yes, to be sure. Rex, who is at school, and knows about as much of what she needs as the dogs do; and little Sophy, who is barely nine. You must think very little of Rosalind, uncle, if you think these children can make up for me.”

“I think a great deal of Rosalind; but we must be reasonable. I thought a woman’s own children, however little worth they may be in themselves, were more to her than any one else’s. Perhaps I am wrong, but that’s in all the copybooks.”

“You want to make me believe,” said Rosalind, with passion, “that I am nobody’s child, that I have no right to love or any home in all the world!”

“My dear! this is madness, Rose. There is your father: and I hope even I count for something; you are the only child I shall ever love. And your aunt Sophy, for whom, in fact, I am pleading, gives you a sort of adoration.”

She got up hastily out of the great gloomy house of a chair and came into the dim centre of light in which he stood, and clasped his arm with her hands. “Uncle John,” she said, speaking very fast and almost inarticulately, “I am very fond of you. You have always been so good and kind; but I am her, and she is me. Don’t you understand? I have always been with her since I was a child. Nobody but me has seen her cry and break down. I know her all through and through. I think her thoughts, not my own. There are no secrets between us. She does not require even to speak, I know what she means without that. There are no secrets between her and me—”

“No secrets,” he said; “no secrets! Rosalind, are you so very sure of that—now?”

Her hands dropped from his arm: she went back and hid herself, as if trying to escape from him and herself in the depths of the great chair; and then there burst from her bosom, in spite of her, a sob—suppressed, restrained, yet irrestrainable—the heaving of a bosom filled to overflowing with unaccustomed misery and pain.

John Trevanion did not take advantage of this piteous involuntary confession. He paused a little, being himself somewhat overcome. “My dear little girl,” he said at last, “I am talking of no terrible separation. People who are the most devoted to each other, lovers even, have to quit each other occasionally, and pay a little attention to other ties. Come! you need not take this so tragically. Sophy is always longing for you. Your father’s sister, and a woman alone in the world; don’t you think she has a claim too?”

Rosalind had got herself in check again while he was speaking. “You mean a great deal more than that,” she said.

Once more he was silent. He knew very well that he meant a great deal more than that. He meant that his niece should be taken away from the woman who was not her mother, a woman of whom he himself had no manner of doubt, yet who, perhaps—how could any one tell?—was getting weary of her thankless task, and looking forward to the freedom to come. John Trevanion’s mind was not much more at rest than that of Rosalind. He had never been supposed to be a partisan of his brother’s wife, but perhaps his abstention from all enthusiasm on this subject was out of too much, not too little feeling. He had been prejudiced against her at first; but his very prejudice had produced a warm revulsion of feeling in her favor, when he saw how she maintained her soul, as she went over the worse than red-hot ploughshares of her long ordeal. It would have injured, not helped her with her husband, had he taken her part; and therefore he had refrained with so much steadiness and gravity, that to Rosalind he had always counted as on the other side. But in his heart he had never been otherwise than on the side of the brave woman who, whether her motives had been good or bad in accepting that place, had nevertheless been the most heroic of wives, the tenderest of mothers. It gave him a tender pleasure to be challenged and defied by the generous impetuosity of Rosalind, all in arms for the mother of her soul. But—there was a but, terrible though it was to acknowledge it—he had recognized, as soon as he arrived on this visit, before any indication of suspicion had been given, that there was some subtile change in Madam Trevanion—something furtive in her eye, a watchfulness, a standing on her guard, which had never been there before. It revolted and horrified him to doubt his sister-in-law; he declared to himself with anxious earnestness that he did not, never would or could doubt her; and yet, in the same breath, with that terrible indulgence which comes with experience, began in an under-current of thought to represent to himself her terrible provocations, the excuses she would have, the temptations to which she might be subject. A man gets his imagination polluted by the world even when he least wishes it. In the upper-current of his soul he believed in her with faith unbounded; but underneath was a little warping eddy, a slimy under-draught which brought up silently the apologies, the reasons, the excuses for her. And if, by any impossibility, it should be so, then was it not essential that Rosalind, too pure to imagine, too young to know any evil or what it meant, or how it could be, should be withdrawn? But he was no more happy than Rosalind was, in the conflict of painful thoughts.

“Yes; I mean more than that,” he resumed, after an interval. “I mean that this house, at present, is not a comfortable place. You must see now that even you cannot help Mrs. Trevanion much in what she has to go through. I feel myself entirely de trop. No sympathy I could show her would counter-balance the pain she must feel in having always present another witness of your father’s abuse—”

“Sympathy!” said Rosalind, with surprise. “I never knew you had any sympathy. I have always considered you as on the other side.”

“Does she think so?” he asked quickly, with a sharp sound of pain in his voice; then recollected himself in another moment. “Ah, well,” he said, “that’s natural, I suppose; the husband’s family are on his side—yes, yes, no doubt she has thought so: the more right am I in my feeling that my presence just now must be very distasteful. And even you, Rosalind; think what she must feel to have all that dirt thrown at her in your presence. Do you think the privilege of having a good cry, as you say, when you are alone together, makes up to her for the knowledge that you are hearing every sort of accusation hurled at her head? I believe in my heart,” he added hurriedly, with a fictitious fervor, “that it would be the greatest relief possible to her to have the house to herself, and see us all, you included, go away.”

Rosalind did not make any reply. She gazed at him from her dark corner with dilated eyes, but he did not see the trouble of her look, nor divine the sudden stimulus his words had given to the whirl of her miserable thoughts. She said to herself that her mother would know, whoever doubted her, that Rosalind never would doubt; and at the same time there came a wondering horror of a question whether indeed her mother would be glad to be rid of her, to have her out of the way, to keep her at least unconscious of the other thing, the secret, perhaps the wrong, that was taking place in those dark evening hours? Might it be, as Uncle John said, better to fly, to turn her back upon any revelation, to refuse to know what it was. The anguish of this conflict of thought tore her unaccustomed heart in twain. And then she tried to realize what the house would be without her, with that profound yet perfectly innocent self-importance of youth which is at once so futile and so touching. So sometimes a young creature dying will imagine, with far more poignant regret than for any suffering of her own, the blank of the empty room, the empty chair, the melancholy vacancy in the house, when she or he has gone hence and is no more. Rosalind saw the great house vacant of herself with a feeling that was almost more than she could bear. When her mother came out of the sick-room, to whom would she go for the repose, the soothing of perfect sympathy—upon whom would she lean when her burden was more than she could bear? When Sophy’s lessons were over, where would the child go? Who would write to Rex, and keep upon the schoolboy the essential bond of home? Who would play with the babies in the nursery when their mother was too much occupied to see them? Mamma would have nobody but Russell, who hated her, and her own maid Jane, who was like her shadow, and all the indifferent servants who cared about little but their own comfort. As she represented all these details of the picture to herself, she burst forth all at once into the silence with a vehement “No, no!” John Trevanion had fallen into thought, and the sound of her voice made him start. “No, no!” she cried, “do you think, Uncle John, I am of so little use? Everybody, even papa, would want me. Sometimes he will bid me sit down, that I am something to look at, something not quite so aggravating as all the rest. Is not that something for one’s father to say? And what would the children do without me, and Duckworth, who cannot always see mamma about the dinner? No, no, I am of use here, and it is my place. Another time I can go to Aunt Sophy—later on, when papa is—better—when things are going smoothly,” she said, with a quiver in her voice, holding back. And just then the distant door of Mr. Trevanion’s room opened and closed, and the doctor appeared, holding back the heavy curtains that screened away every draught from the outer world.

CHAPTER V

“Well,” said Dr. Beaton, rubbing his hands as he came forward, “at last we are tolerably comfortable. I have got him to bed without much more difficulty than usual, and I hope he will have a good night. But how cold it is here! I suppose, however careful you may be, it is impossible to keep draughts out of an apartment that communicates with the open air. If you will take my advice, Miss Rosalind, you will get to your warm room, and to bed, while your uncle and I adjourn to the smoking-room, where there are creature comforts—”

The doctor was always cheerful. He laughed as if all the incidents of the evening had been the most pleasant in the world.

“Is papa better, doctor?”

“Is Mrs. Trevanion with my brother?”

These two questions were asked together. The doctor answered them both with a “Yes—yes—where would she be but with him? My dear sir, you are a visitor, you are not used to our ways. All that is just nothing. He cannot do without her. We know better, Miss Rosalind; we take it all very easy. Come, come, there is nothing to be disturbed about. I will have you on my hands if you don’t mind. My dear young lady, go to bed.”

“I have been proposing that she should go to her aunt for a week or two for a little change.”

“The very best thing she could do. This is the worst time of the year for Highcourt. So much vegetation is bad in November. Yes—change by all means. But not,” said the doctor, with a little change of countenance, “too long, and not too far away.”

“Do you think,” said Rosalind, “that mamma will not want me to-night? then I will go as you say. But if you think there is any chance that she will want me—”

“She will not leave the patient again. Good-night, Miss Rosalind, sleep sound and get back your roses—or shall I send you something to make you sleep? No? Well, youth will do it, which is best.”

She took her candle, and went wearily up the great staircase, pausing, a white figure in the gloom, to wave her hand to Uncle John before she disappeared in the gallery above. The two men stood and watched her without a word. A tender reverence and pity for her youth was in both their minds. There was almost an oppression of self-restraint upon them till she was out of sight and hearing. Then John Trevanion turned to his companion:

“I gather by what you say that you think my brother worse to-night.”

“Not worse to-night; but only going the downhill road, and now and then at his own will and pleasure putting on a spurt. The nearer you get to the bottom the greater is the velocity. Sometimes the rate is terrifying at the last.”

“And you think, accordingly, that if she goes away it must not be too far; she must be within reach of a hasty summons?”

Dr. Beaton nodded his head several times in succession. “I may be mistaken,” he said, “there is a vitality that fairly surprises me; but that is in any other case what I should say.”

“Have these outbursts of temper much to do with it? Are they accelerating the end?”

“That’s the most puzzling question you could ask. How is a poor medical man, snatching his bit of knowledge as he can find it, to say yea or nay? Oh yes, they have to do with it; everything has to do with it either as cause or effect? If it were not perhaps for the temper, there would be less danger with the heart; and if it were not for the weak heart, there would be less temper. Do ye see? Body and soul are so jumbled together, it is ill to tell which is which. But between them the chances grow less and less. And you will see, by to-night’s experience, it’s not very easy to put on the drag.”

“And yet Mrs. Trevanion is nursing him, you say, as if nothing had happened.”

The doctor gave a strange laugh. “A sick man is a queer study,” he said, “and especially an excitable person with no self-control and all nerves and temper, like—if you will excuse me for saying so—your brother. Now that he needs her he is very capable of putting all this behind him. He will just ignore it, and cast himself upon her for everything, till he thinks he can do without her again. Ah! it is quite a wonderful mystery, the mind of a sick and selfish man.”

“I was thinking rather of her,” said John Trevanion.

“Oh! her?” said the doctor, waving his hand; “that’s simple. There’s nothing complicated in that. She is the first to accept that grand reason as conclusive, just that he has need of her. There’s a wonderful philosophy in some women. When they come to a certain pitch they will bear anything. And she is one of that kind. She will put it out of her mind as I would put a smouldering bombshell out of this hall. At least,” said the doctor, with that laugh which was so inappropriate, “I hope I would do it, I hope I would not just run away. The thing with women is that they cannot run away.”

“These are strange subjects to discuss with—pardon me—a stranger; but you are not a stranger—they can have no secrets from you. Doctor, tell me, is the scene to-night a usual one? Was there nothing particular in it?”

John Trevanion fixed very serious eyes—eyes that held the person they looked on fast, and would permit no escape—on the doctor’s face. The other shifted about uneasily from one foot to the other, and did his utmost to avoid that penetrating look.

“Oh, usual enough, usual enough; but there might be certain special circumstances,” he said.

“You mean that Mrs. Trevanion—”

“Well, if you will take my opinion, she had probably been to see the coachman’s wife, who is far from well, poor body; I should say that was it. It is across a bit of the park, far enough to account for everything.”

“But why then not give so simple a reason?”

“Ah! there you beat me; how can I tell? The way in which a thing presents itself to a woman’s mind is not like what would occur to you and me.”

“Is the coachman’s wife so great a favorite? Has she been ill long, and is it necessary to go to see her every night?”

“Mr. Trevanion,” said the doctor, “you are well acquainted with the nature of evidence. I cannot answer all these questions. There is no one near Highcourt, as you are aware, that does not look up to Madam; a visit from her is better than physic. She has little time, poor lady, for such kindness. With all that’s exacted from her, I cannot tell, for my part, what other moment she can call her own.”

John Trevanion would not permit the doctor to escape. He held him still with his keen eyes. “Doctor,” he said, “I think I am as much concerned as you are to prove her in the right, whatever happens; but it seems to me you are a special pleader—making your theory to fit the circumstances, ingenious rather than certain.”

“Mr. John Trevanion,” said the doctor, solemnly, “there is one thing I am certain of, that yon poor lady by your brother’s bedside is a good woman, and that the life he leads her is just a hell on earth.”

After this there was a pause. The two men stood no longer looking at each other: they escaped from the scrutiny of each other, which they had hitherto kept up, both somewhat agitated and shaken in the solicitude and trouble of the house.

“I believe all that,” said John Trevanion at last. “I believe every word. Still— But yet—”

Dr. Beaton made no reply. Perhaps these monosyllables were echoing through his brain too. He had known her for years, and formed his opinion of her on the foundation of long and intimate knowledge. But still—and yet: could a few weeks, a few days, undo the experience of years? It was no crime to walk across the park at night, in the brief interval which the gentlemen spent over their wine after dinner. Why should not Madam Trevanion take the air at that hour if she pleased? Still he made no answer to that breath of doubt.

The conversation was interrupted by the servants who came to close doors and windows, and perform the general shutting-up for the night. Neither of the gentlemen was sorry for this interruption. They separated to make that inevitable change in their dress which the smoking-room demands, with a certain satisfaction in getting rid of the subject, if even for a moment. But when Dr. Beaton reached, through the dim passages from which all life had retired, that one centre of light and fellowship, the sight of young Hamerton in his evening coat, with a pale and disturbed countenance, brought back to him the subject he had been so glad to drop. Hamerton had forgotten his dress-coat, and even that smoking-suit which was the joy of his heart. He had been a prisoner in the drawing-room, or rather in the conservatory, while that terrible scene went on. Never in his harmless life had he touched the borders of tragedy before, and he was entirely unmanned. The doctor found him sitting nervously on the edge of a chair, peering into the fire, his face haggard, his eyes vacant and bloodshot. “I say, doctor,” he said, making a grasp at his arm, “I want to tell you; I was in there all the time. What could I do? I couldn’t get out with the others. I had been in the conservatory before—and I saw— Good gracious, you don’t think I wanted to see! I thought it was better to keep quiet than to show that I had been there all the time.”

“You ought to have gone away with the others,” said the doctor, “but there is no great harm done; except to your nerves; you look quite shaken. He was very bad. When a man lets himself go on every occasion, and does and says exactly what he has a mind to, that’s what it ends in at the last. It is, perhaps, as well that a young fellow like you should know.”

“Oh, hang it,” said young Hamerton, “that is not the worst. I never was fond of old Trevanion. It don’t matter so much about him.”

“You mean that to hear a man bullying his wife like that makes you wish to kill him, eh? Well, that’s a virtuous sentiment; but she’s been long used to it. Let us hope she is like the eels and doesn’t mind—”

“It’s not that,” said the youth again. John Trevanion was in no hurry to appear, and the young man’s secret scorched him. He looked round suspiciously to make sure there was no one within sight or hearing. “Doctor,” he said, “you are Madam’s friend. You take her side?”

Dr. Beaton, who was a man of experience, looked at the agitation of his companion with a good deal of curiosity and some alarm. “If she had a side, yes, to the last of my strength.”

“Then I don’t mind telling you. When he began to swear— What an old brute he is!”

“Yes? when he began to swear—”

“I thought they mightn’t like it, don’t you know? We’re old friends at home, but still I have never been very much at Highcourt; so I thought they mightn’t like to have me there. And I thought I’d just slip out of the way into the conservatory, never thinking how I was to get back. I went right in to the end part where there was no light. You can see out into the park. I never thought of that. I was not thinking anything: when I saw—”

“Get it out, for Heaven’s sake! You had no right to be there. What did you see? Some of the maids about—”

“Doctor, I must get it off my mind. I saw Madam Trevanion parting with—a man. I can’t help it, I must get it out. I saw her as plainly as I see you.”

The doctor was very much disturbed and pale, but he burst into a laugh. “In a dark night like this! You saw her maid I don’t doubt, or a kitchen girl with her sweetheart. At night all the cats are gray. And you think it is a fine thing to tell a cock-and-bull story like this—you, a visitor in the house?”

“Doctor, you do me a great deal of injustice.” The young man’s heart heaved with agitation and pain. “Don’t you see it is because I feel I was a sort of eavesdropper against my will, that I must tell you? Do you think Madam Trevanion could be mistaken for a maid? I saw her—part from him and come straight up to the house—and then, in another moment, she came into the room, and I—I saw all that happened there.”

“For an unwilling witness, Mr. Hamerton, you seem to have seen a great deal,” said the doctor, with a gleam of fury in his eyes.

“So I was—unwilling, most unwilling: you said yourself my nerves were shaken. I’d rather than a thousand pounds I hadn’t seen her. But what am I to do? If there was any trial or anything, would they call me as a witness? That’s what I want to ask. In that case I’ll go off to America or Japan or somewhere. They sha’n’t get a word against her out of me.”

The moral shock which Dr. Beaton had received was great, and yet he scarcely felt it to be a surprise. He sat for some moments in silence, pondering how to reply. The end of his consideration was that he turned round upon the inquirer with a laugh. “A trial,” he said, “about what? Because Mr. Trevanion is nasty to his wife, and says things to her a man should be ashamed to say? Women can’t try their husbands for being brutes, more’s the pity! and she is used to it; or because (if it was her at all) she spoke to somebody she met—a groom most likely—and gave him his orders! No, no, my young friend, there will be no trial. But for all that,” he added, somewhat fiercely, “I would advise you to hold your tongue on the subject now that you have relieved your mind. The Trevanions are kittle customers when their blood’s up. I would hold my tongue for the future if I were you.”

And then John Trevanion came in, cloudy and thoughtful, in his smoking-coat, with a candle in his hand.

CHAPTER VI

Reginald Trevanion of Highcourt had made at thirty a marriage which was altogether suitable, and everything that the marriage of a young squire of good family and considerable wealth ought to be, with a young lady from a neighboring county with a pretty face and a pretty fortune, and connections of the most unexceptionable kind. He was not himself an amiable person even as a young man, but no one had ever asserted that his temper or his selfishness or his uneasy ways had contributed to bring about the catastrophe which soon overwhelmed the young household. A few years passed with certain futile attempts at an heir which came to nothing; and it was thought that the disappointment in respect to Rosalind, who obstinately insisted upon turning out a girl, notwithstanding her poor young mother’s remorseful distress and her father’s refusal to believe that Providence could have played him so cruel a trick, had something to do with the gradual fading away of young Madam Trevanion. She died when Rosalind was but a few weeks old, and her husband, whom all the neighborhood credited with a broken heart, disappeared shortly after into that vague world known in a country district as “Abroad;” where healing, it is to be supposed, or at least forgetfulness, is to be found for every sorrow. Nothing was known of him for a year or two. His brother, John Trevanion, was then a youth at college, and, as Highcourt was shut up during its master’s absence, disposed of his vacation among other branches of the family, and never appeared; while Sophy, the only sister, who had married long before, was also lost to the district. And thus all means of following the widower in his wanderings were lost to his neighbors. When Mr. Trevanion returned, three years after his first wife’s death, the first intimation that he had married again was the appearance of the second Madam Trevanion by his side in the carriage. The servants, indeed, had been prepared by a letter, received just in time to enable them to open hurriedly the shut-up rooms, and make ready for a lady; but that was all. Of course, as everybody allowed, there was nothing surprising in the fact. It is to be expected that a young widower, especially if heartbroken, will marry again; the only curious thing was that no public intimation of the event should have preceded the arrival of the pair. There had been nothing in the papers, no intimation “At the British Embassy—,” no hint that an English gentleman from one of the Midland counties was about to bring home a charming wife. And, as a matter of fact, nobody had been able to make out who Mrs. Trevanion was. Her husband and she had met abroad. That was all that was ever known. For a time the researches of the parties interested were very active, and all sorts of leading questions were put to the new wife. But she was of force superior to the country ladies, and baffled them all. And the calm of ordinary existence closed over Highcourt, and the questions in course of time were forgot. Madam Trevanion was not at all of the class of her predecessor. She was not pretty like that gentle creature. Even those who admired her least owned that she was striking, and many thought her handsome, and some beautiful. She was tall; her hair and her eyes were dark; she had the wonderful grace of bearing and movement which is associated with the highest class, but no more belongs to it exclusively than any other grace or gift. Between Madam Trevanion and the Duchess of Newbury, who was herself a duke’s daughter, and one of the greatest ladies in England, no chance spectator would have hesitated for a moment as to which was the highest; and yet nobody knew who she was. It was thought by some persons that she showed at first a certain hesitation about common details of life which proved that she had not been born in the purple. But, if so, all that was over before she had been a year at Highcourt, and her manners were pronounced by the best judges to be perfect. She was not shy of society as a novice would have been, nor was her husband diffident in taking her about, as a proud man who has married beneath him so generally is. They accepted all their invitations like people who were perfectly assured of their own standing, and they saw more company at Highcourt than that venerable mansion had seen before for generations. And there was nothing to which society could take exception in the new wife. She had little Rosalind brought home at once, and was henceforth as devoted as any young mother could be to the lovely little plaything of a three-years-old child. Then she did her duty by the family as it becomes a wife to do. The first was a son, as fine a boy as was ever born to a good estate, a Trevanion all over, though he had his mother’s eyes—a boy that never ailed anything, as robust as a young lion. Five or six others followed, of whom two died; but these were ordinary incidents of life which establish a family in the esteem and sympathy of its neighbors. The Trevanions had fulfilled all that was needed to be entirely and fully received into the regard of the county when they “buried,” as people say, their two children. Four remained, the first-born, young Reginald, and his next sister, who were at the beginning of this history fourteen and nine respectively, and the two little ones of five and seven, who were also, to fulfil all requirements, girl and boy.